Project 01 : Musician 22

Brooklyn, NY

Meeting of the Citizens Musical Underground

Calling all street corner poets: meet me in the back room
All ye bar bands, all ye handlers of pans, I gotta talk to you
You back porch strummers, you bedtime hummers,
You verse scribblers and griot drummers
It’s an emergency
Need you to talk to me

Y’see I met a little girl, says she can’t sing without a microphone–I know
Like the singers on her mp3s, the TV, and the radio
Oh, you laugh and you sigh but she’s just yay high and she’s got the disease
Won’t you help us please, wise sages of word and sound
Of the Citizens Musical Underground

…let the light in
Underground
Where’s the fight left in us?
Underground
When there’s a bite in the dust
Find a voice you can trust underground.

Calling on you in the back with the knit cap and the blue jeans
You say, “I sang my kids lullabies every night ’till they were in their teens.
No bright light shimmer no glitz and glimmer
No word from our sponsor when the lights get dimmer
Little girl can’t see
She wouldn’t know about the likes of me”

Then a voice pipes from the singer in The Roadhouse Symphony
She says, “They done a good job boxin’ all of us up in specialty.
The songs for the singers, the thoughts for the thinkers,
The laws for the makers, the bells for the ringers
Then who’s left when we are lost to make us found?
But the Citizens Musical Underground.”

…flame grows higher
Underground
Join the choir or alone
Underground
You can lose the microphone
Tell the story that you own underground
…let the light in
Underground
Where’s the fight left in us?
Underground
When it all bites the dust
Find a voice you can trust underground.

Jean talks about the songwriting process

Recently, I've been fueled by a couple of things in my music and essay writing. One is the idea of story. I am fascinated by the ways that we use story to shape our lives, to make sense of what goes on around us. There are narratives constantly entering our awareness. What are the stories that are meaningful to me now? What are the stories that are important for us to tell in our culture? Newspaper articles get me going. Stories I hear from friends, the little surprises in an otherwise regular day. The other is the idea of music serving a function in our lives. Music for dancing, music for church, music to hoist the sails, wash the linens, music for the bar, for wooing a lover, music to convey information, an urgent message, a story. I like playing with some of these traditional designations and seeing what happens. Lastly, I think, I often find myself using found words and sound to get started, unraveling a song from something someone said, a piece of a poem, or even melodic fragments from sources as disparate as an atonal sight-singing workbook to a melody hummed by a stranger as she walks down the street.

One of her most powerful musical experiences

When I was 12 or 13 I went with my family to Maryland to visit Alan Lomax, the noted collector (along with his dad, John) of folk songs in the US and beyond. So many songs that we know as part of our national folk heritage survived to today through the recordings he made of the great songwriters and keepers of tradition, many of them poor, exploited workers, farmers, their names unknown to us. Anyway, Mr. Lomax had just had a stroke, and by coincidence my aunt was one of his nurses. She called us and told us to come down and meet him. So my parents, my brother, and I spent the afternoon with him and his caretakers one weekend singing songs. He had suffered some neurological damage and had a hard time moving and speaking, but we sang to him, sometimes songs that we only knew because of his cataloging, and he sang along with gusto, forming the words as best he could, rocking back and forth joyfully in his chair. It was obvious that the music pulled him past the obstacles of his debility and into a place of great happiness. Even at my young age, I could see that I was standing in that river of time with the lives and voices of so many before me rippling about my knees.

Fun facts about Jean

My hobby is gardening. I grow veggies and flowers in my yard.
I have never had a cavity or broken a bone.
I started college by losing all my clothes, spectacularly, on I-95 and ended it on the evening news.
I perform with my band as Jean Rohe and the End of the World Show. We have a gigantic record coming out in the next few months, featuring a new national anthem sung by the End of the World Show Choir.